If so that is somewhat ironic. A message intended to communicate a date to thousands of years into the future got demolished a mere 86 years after its creation due to a drainage issue and a contract dispute.
Some ideas/questions: How is it painted? Is it laser cut or by hand? Did you designed it? How did you do the calculations? Does Saturn have rings? Where is the cutoff? (No Neptune/Uranus/Fobos/Deimos/...) Have you tried to give a different size to each planet?
PS: I showed the video to my older daughter that is interested in astronomy and she likes it.
Oh. That is very kind of you. I do have many more pictures and details. I will try to collect them together, and will publish it once it is done. But can’t promise that it will happen soon. So i will answer your questions here in the meantime.
> How is it painted?
The shapes are recessed and the recesses are filled with black nail polish. The excess nail polish was then scraped off from the flat upper surfaces leaving it only in the recesses.
It was very fiddly, and i don’t necessarily recommend this method for anyone. I have since learned how to enamel by melting glass powders onto the metal surface which is both easier and gives a better result. That is how i would do it today. (On my instagram the last reel i posted is showing that process, even though with a different design.)
> Is it laser cut or by hand?
A third and a fourth option. The planet side is machined on a cnc. First I etched the orbits with a v-bit, then cut the planets with a 0.8mm flat endmill, then cut the hole, and finally cut the outline. After that i etched the initials side chemically. As a resist i used self-adhesive vinyl which i cut with a plotter.
To be honest. I wouldn’t recommend this process either. It was super finicky, slow, and error prone. Today i would just etch and cut the metal with a fiber laser. In fact i bought a fiber laser because i got sick of the chemical etching and mechanical machining during this project. :)
> Did you designed it? How did you do the calculations?
I did design it! I’m very proud of it. The initials side was designed in inkscape while the planet side was generated with a python script. The script used the super handy skyfield python library for the calculations. (Which in turn uses the planetary ephemeris files published by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.)
> Does Saturn have rings?
No ring of Saturn unfortunately. But it would be a cool idea!
> Where is the cutoff? (No Neptune/Uranus/Fobos/Deimos/...)
Unfortunately I don’t have a real good principled answer to this. Because of the machining I had a hard limit on the smallest details I could put on the metal. I did know that i wanted to put the Gallilean moons on there because their short periods meant that they provide good basis for the minutes and hours part of the date. I did know that i also wanted one of the gas giants to provide a “slow hand” to the clock to show the years, and to hopefully stretch out the period before the next time the solar system is in a similar position to very far into the future. And i wanted the inner planets and the Moon so people and future alien minds will recognise it as the solar system. Everything else was just futzing around with the script and finding a good compromise between not making it too large to wear and not making it too crowded either.
> Have you tried to give a different size to each planet?
I did, but it looked uneven and too haphazard to my eyes. Not saying it is impossible to make it neat with different planet sizes but I liked the diagram simplicity of keeping all the planets one size and the moons an other smaller size.
> I showed the video to my older daughter that is interested in astronomy and she likes it.
Oh thank you! That is lovely!
They have a very handy example right on the landing page how one can calculate the positions and angles of a planet from a date.
The inverse was a bit trickier. But I also implemented a script which could “solve” a given picture backwards and give us a date. I believe i used binary search to narrow the date down first for the planet with the slowest period, and then refined the date around that timestamp using the position of the planet one faster. That way the estimate got more and more accurate and i didn’t need to brute force search a large time interval. (I applied the assumption that the date to be found is within half a saturn year from our current date, but if that assumption were incorrect it would have resulted in a solver failure during the refinement and thus detected.)
> Due to the precession of the equinoxes (as well as the stars' proper motions), the role of North Star has passed from one star to another in the remote past, and will pass in the remote future. In 3000 BC, the faint star Thuban in the constellation Draco was the North Star, aligning within 0.1° distance from the celestial pole, the closest of any of the visible pole stars.[8][9] However, at magnitude 3.67 (fourth magnitude) it is only one-fifth as bright as Polaris, and today it is invisible in light-polluted urban skies.
> During the 1st millennium BC, Beta Ursae Minoris (Kochab) was the bright star closest to the celestial pole, but it was never close enough to be taken as marking the pole, and the Greek navigator Pytheas in ca. 320 BC described the celestial pole as devoid of stars.[6][10] In the Roman era, the celestial pole was about equally distant between Polaris and Kochab.
If you're in SF you should pay them a visit and buy a coffee at The Interval; I think you'll find it worth the trip.
Its nice to see that some people still care about creating such thoughtful art for modern constructions. It seems that most building of our time are just optimized for fast and efficient construction.
I hope there are many more out there, so that Earth's Graham Hancock of the year 16000 has something to explore on his/her ayahuasca trip.
Those buildings are, of course, gone now.
I wonder if some content creator 12K years from now will transport to Earth and stream the North Star from this position for likes/views. If that's even a thing then...
I’m so intrigued - what was going on inside Hansen's brain?
Victory/elation/worship corresponds to extending the arms above the head or in a "V" shape, sorrow/grief corresponds to dropping to the knees and holding the head in the hands, etc. These associations seem to persist despite language barriers and great spans of time.
Walking along the millennia, viewing the night's glorious celestial panorama, the registrations on the floor, you'll have successfully circumnavigated the long now, as well the total integral of your own life.
Religion the category is only a few hundred years old. The things that fall under that category go back at least as far as Neanderthal times.
Casadio details it going back thousands of years across cultures.[2]
[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/concept-religion/index.ht...
[2] https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9780191045882_A29773...
the fact that _now_, we have independent traditions referred to by those terms, and so categorize the ancient practices under "religion" is quite confusing, and it may be productive to make the distinction clear.
for a modern example, suppose we build a skyscraper in such a way that it lines up with, or reflects the setting sun on the solstice. we would regard this as "architecture", not "religion". i would be quite offended if, some thousand years from now, the aesthetic decision is dismissed as primitive superstition.
Why? I can't imagine being offended if people today, ignorant of the true motivations, dismissed it as primitive superstition, let alone a thousand years from now when I'm long dead.
> The concept of "religion" was formed in the 16th and 17th centuries. Sacred texts like the Bible, the Quran, and others did not have a word or even a concept of religion in the original languages and neither did the people or the cultures in which these sacred texts were written
That said, GrowingSideways is mistaken. He is confusing the thing with the category of the thing.
IMO this and the sources it cites are wrong. A huge chunk of the Old Testament is about how God had to keep sending prophets to tell the Israelites to stop worshipping other deities. So while they may not have had a single word that was equivalent to 'religion,' they clearly possessed the same concept. They would just use the phrase "worshipping other gods."
There are many texts written in the Greek or Roman antiquity that compare the religions of various nations known to them, i.e. which compare their beliefs about their "gods" and their methods for worshiping or for praying.
There are entire books written about such subjects, e.g. "De natura deorum" ("The nature of gods") by Cicero.
The ancient people usually did not have a precise word with the definite meaning that "religion" has today, mainly because religious practices were intermingled with most of their daily activities, so there was not a very clear separation between religion and other things.
For example, a treatise on agriculture, besides explaining how to prepare the soil and how to select the seeds for sowing, would also give the text of a prayer that should address a certain god before or after the sowing, so that it will be successful. Similarly for any other activities where divine help was believed to be necessary.
Nevertheless, they had the concept of religion and they were able to distinguish things that were related to gods from unrelated things.
Kinda sus of this.
Only in the northern hemisphere.
The statues in OP's article are absolutely beautiful examples of Art Deco / 1930s Americana (my local post office was built then, too, and has eaglettes of similar [but smaller] design). I had no idea they were out there until stumbling upon them, and they definitely leave a lasting impression of our forefather's imposing presence. America, fuck yeah!
Wish I had then-known about this "clock," which is definitely hidden in plain sight. Wish we had similarly-lavish federal budgets, today. But worth visiting, both article, statues & dam.
We will quite plausibly be known as the dam builder civilization, as these artifacts could very easily outlast the memory of what we call ourselves. It is fitting to embellish them in this way.
Person in far future:
Was that in the original 01931 as in 1931? Or is that the usual truncation of 101931, since most relevant dates are in this decamillennium?
Leading zeros don't do what you think they do; you need look no further than how people say 03 when they mean 2003. A leading zero does not unambiguously say "there are no implied nonzero digits to the left of this zero".
Just, stop.
Or find some other convention, like, say, =1931. The = means, this is an exact value and not some value truncated modulo a power of ten.
a.k.a. cuckoo clock